Reading, Music, and the Pub, by Neil McGowan

It’s been a week of firsts for me. Well, not really, but it feels like it, after the last couple of years.

Firstly, I went to my local pub for a quiet drink with my wife and in-laws; I worked out whilst there that it was two years to the day since the last time I’d set foot in a pub.

It was a pleasant afternoon, and the conversation ranged back and forth over various topics but as we are all avid readers, we spent some time discussing books and comparing the recent titles we’ve read. What was interesting was the way all of us had read outside our usual genres; myself, I’ve dabbled with the classics in addition to my usual diet of crime, science fiction, and horror. Some of them I liked; some...not so much. What did become clear was what I really wanted, regardless of genre, was story: I wanted something to happen to the characters, good or bad, and for them to change during the course of the story.

I’ll not name the books I didn’t get on with. (My policy is to either give a positive review, or not to say anything as I’m aware that it’s very much a matter of taste and my not enjoying a book doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad story, rather that it’s not for me.) One of them was recommended by my father in law a couple of months back. I was already trepiditious as it concerned a football manager (and it’s probably the sport I loathe above all others) but he recommended it as an interesting character study. Well, I finished it. I gritted my teeth and ploughed through it, all 600+ pages of it, and I don’t think I’ve ever been as glad to put a book down. What was interesting to me is my frustration with it was less about the football content (there was less than I’d feared, as it happens) but with the style of writing. I could understand my Father-in-law recommending it, as it was a genuinely interesting look at character and how internal and external factors affected and influenced him. The problem, for me, was bloat. I remember throwing it down several times and muttering about getting a decent editor, and that there was no need to continuously repeat the same word or phrase three times. After a couple of hundred pages of this technique I was grumpy with the author; after another couple of hundred, I wanted to strangle them with a typewriter ribbon. I’m still not sure what effect was being tried for, but it missed the mark with me.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve recently finished Janice Hallet’s ‘The Appeal’ and can heartily recommend it. It’s somewhat different from a lot of crime novels (I’m trying to remember the last time I read an epistolary novel, and whilst I can remember writing a short story in that style around twenty-five years ago, the only one I recall reading is Dracula) and is more gentle in its pacing. The characters are all intriguing (and in some cases, quite repulsive) but they are all believable.

The other first was my first visit to the opera, again in almost two years. The writing connection? It was Britten’s take of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

I was keen to see this on a couple of levels – firstly, because I love the opera; for me, it’s the peak of synergy between music, song, and drama – but also because I was intrigued to see what Britten had done with the play.

I’d never really ‘got’ Shakespeare when I studied him at school; I found it dense and impenetrable. It’s only recently that I’ve started to really understand the elegance and the deeper subtexts at work in his plays. Britten’s take was interesting as he took the play itself as the libretto, adding only one line to explain the shift of the start from Athens to the woodlands. The music was fabulous, the choice of using a smaller, pared-down orchestral palette seemed to accentuate and underscore the text and further develop the characters.

I’ve not read much Shakespeare yet, only the comedies, but am now inspired to dig into the more serious works. And the funny thing is, my love of reading seems to have been given a burst of life by merely reading outside my usual areas, or by using music to give new insight to the words.

And the opera? It was fantastic; I’ve already booked to see Mozart’s Don Giovanni in June.